Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Soviet censorship an ‘incredible mincing machine’, vividly capturing its all-encompassing, systemic nature. The Soviet censorship apparatus, which controlled all printed output, was a vast, multi-layered system of preliminary and post-publication control that aimed to create and impose political, moral and ideological norms in all areas of public life. Embedded in Party and state structures, censorship extended its reach into almost all areas of Soviet life, like ‘a kind of monster’, according to one critic.

Despite the easing of Tsarist censorship by the provisional government, the Bolsheviks quickly reconstructed a formal censorship apparatus after the revolution. On 27 October 1917, Lenin, as chairman of the Sovnarkom, signed a decree on the press instituting a new censorship regime. This decree established temporary extraordinary measures against the bourgeois press, which, in the Bolsheviks’ minds, posed a grave threat to the new political order. Lenin declared that ‘as soon as the new order is consolidated, all administrative measures against the press will be suspended’, though it must be noted that freedom of the press was only ever meant to be given ‘within the limits of responsibility before the laws, in accordance with the broadest and most progressive in this respect’. The main arm of the Soviet censorship apparatus was the Main Administration of Literature and Publishing, most often known by the shortened form of its full title, Glavlit. Glavlit held responsibility for setting norms and implementing censorship, by which was meant the control of all printed production including literature, newspapers and other printed items such as pamphlets and forms. The foundation of Glavlit in 1922 saw the creation of a fully-formed, centralised bureaucratic structure for the control of publication. Initially (until 1936) existing under the auspices of Narkompros and led by Pavel Ivanovich Lebedev-Polianskii, it was tasked with overseeing the publication of printed output and controlling foreign publications imported into the country; its remit covered pre-and post-publication censorship of almost all printed periodical and non-periodical publications including photographs, drawings and maps. Theatrical and musical censorship was first overseen by Glavrepertkom, the Main Repertory Committee, set up in 1923. Glavrepertkom became part of Glavisskustvo, the Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and the Arts, which exercised ideological control over all kinds of creative endeavours including literature, fine art, cinema and circus.